CW internalized transphobia, gender dysphoria
To be clear, I understand there’s no cutoff on the age of transition. But I swear to god I keep coming across this talking point made in the worst way possible. They’re trying to reassure young people who are insecure about having gone through their first puberty already but they’ll say some shit like, “I didn’t start transitioning until I was 24 and it still turned out well for me.” And you look at their before pictures and they were conventionally attractive and had other advantages like being transfemme with minimal natural body hair growth. Like goddamn that is not reassuring.
You gotta go to irl trans support groups. The trans ladies who are freshly egg-cracked seniors and just don't give a fuck are amazing.
I need this in my life. There's a trans woman bartender that makes me happy to see and talk to. She doesn't give a fuck about passing.
Also I asked her what her favorite karaoke song is and it's "Piss Up a Rope"
I'm too far for irl but even virtual can confirm these are awesome, and you can learn so much about resources available, methods of taking hrt, etc.
I wasn't able to start HRT until I was basically 30, but I knew since childhood, there was just no way it was happening any earlier and even now its a challenge.
I first had signs that I wasn't cis in high school. This was decades ago. I didn't have the language to conceive of it back then. I had no hope of recognizing these feelings and acting on them.
I wish I had the knowledge that young people have now, and I wish I could have been able to present the way I wanted through my 20's. I'm old and blown out now, and it gives me anxiety.
BUT, you gotta kill the gender cop in your head. You may look at these before pictures and say "wow, you looked Great!" But the people in the pictures most likely don't feel that way. They like the way the look now regardless of the rough edges. Surely, they still feel that same dysphoria you're feeling now, but they'll always prefer how they are now to how they were.
So yeah, some of us missed our golden opportunity. We'll never be young and hot, and our bodies have developed in ways that we don't like. But, we gotta pull that trigger anyway, and we have to do it confidently. We'll be better for it.
Fuckin murders me that people could consider TWENTY FOUR YEARS OLD to be "too old to transition". I've met people who transitioned in their late 30s or 40s, dawg, Idk what to tell em. 24 is YOUNG to me.
The whole idea around being "too old to transition" in the first place is the worst kind of /tttt/ brainworm. Who let this shit filter out to INFLUENCERS???
Fr I saw a like 5 year or something transition timeline of a woman old enough to be my grandma and hrt did wonders for her.
It truly is never too old to transition. I started transitioning at 33. My egg didn’t crack until 32. Unfortunately, I do not have a very strong sense of introspection, so I just let all the dysphoria I was feeling over the years be passed off as depression. Also, where I lived, transitioning was an unheard of thing andI knew literally zero people who even questioned their gender while I was growing up, therefore never really having that spark lit. To put it in perspective, I graduated in a high school of almost 2k people in it. At the end of the day I’m not a senior, but I’m definitely not young either. And prior to transition, I was a scruff looking motherfucker. I am not certain if I was ever conventionally “handsome”, but I most certainly never did have a femme body build. I’m unfortunately built large and had a ton of hair prior to all this. I do pass. Am I good looking? Idk. I couldn’t say. But I don’t get misgendered anymore. So I guess that counts for something. This is all 18 months into HRT and with a great deal of effort on my part for voice training, changing wardrobe, changing my mannerisms, learning makeup, and just trying my damnedest to not give a fuck about other people.
Look, you’re honestly just get hyper transfixed on these people. In the end, you need to evaluate for yourself if you think this is the right path for yourself. And let me tell you, I have quite a few not young friends that have gone from extremely male looking to very femme looking through the years of their HRT. The stuff is quite frankly a fucking miracle. And there is a lot to be done outside of just taking the HRT. Unfortunately, HRT itself doesn’t exactly fix everything. You’ve gotta put work in in some aspects to help things. But it can truly bring you places.
If you need help regarding all of this, please feel free to DM me and I can attempt to help you dissolve such thoughts. I’d be more than happy to attempt to assist you.
"had other advantages like being transfemme with minimal natural body hair growth" fwiw i had dark, visible body hair before i started hrt at 27 and most of my chest, stomach, leg, and arm hair has gone white, thin, and grows super slowly
This bothers me too. Of course I wish I had transitioned earlier (who doesn't?), but I'm still young and I never thought age would be an issue. Then I see so many people online talking like even pretty early twenties is a really late age to transition and get self-conscious about it.
Even if the idea of living out publicly as trans seems impossible at this point, you can still take important and worthy steps toward reducing your own dysphoria. For instance, you could try to embrace and accept your feminine side or feminine aspects of your personality instead of feeling negatively about them. Medically, if this is something you are interested in, you could try low-dose HRT or just androgen suppression or blockade (although this can impact your bone health long term).
While some influencers may come off as blase or feel like they are pitching to people too young to feel relatable, its important to realize the enemy is not these influencers but the transphobic society which makes it feel hard to accept their message; don't kill the messenger!
If it's of any help to you, i started getting on HRT in my early 40s and i turned out fine and have a nice dating life and can cross the street without getting rocks thrown at me. A lot of things just sort themselves out with time. Besides that, people tend to vastly underestimate how much of transitioning is social and psychological. I'd never deny the usefulness of HRT or laser hair removal, my life was daily hell before these things, but getting rid of dysphoria, actually healing that damage and being able to enjoy and love and be proud of being trans, that wasn't just a question of medical changes, it sure as hell isn't a question of passing perfectly and living up to some cissexist, transmysogynist standard of normative beauty, it's a matter of tearing out your internalized transphobia, your transmedicalism, your believe in the gender binary, your subservience to patriarchy. It's about cutting yourself loose from these things, accepting and honing your queerness and your will to resist, learning to love trans people and be loved by them, learning to claim your place among cis people not by stealthing it, but by asserting your right to be your authentic self.
The entire narrative you're describing is assimilationist baby trans garbage. I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, i get that people hyperfixate on their deep regret over going through their first puberty when they are new to this and are in the phase where dysphoria hits the hardest, but outgrowing that mindset is the only way to a fulfilled, happy life as a trans person. No amount of passing will help you when you secretly want to be cis.
